Wednesday, February 18, 2009

A good friend of mine named Therese was taking care of her seriously ill sister in Chicago recently, and scheduled to fly home to Long Island on Feb. 12, the same day Continental Flight 3407 crashed near Buffalo, NY. However, when her sister woke up that morning, it was with an hysterical premonition of bad weather---wind specifically---impacting air travel, and she begged Therese to cancel her flight. Given the intensity of her dying sister's concern, Therese accommodated her, and called Southwestern Airlines to cancel---asking, as an aside, if any flights were being canceled that day due to bad weather. She was told that some flights were being canceled due to bad weather, but only to Buffalo, New York.

I don't know what possible relevance this has to an analysis of the Flight 3407 crash, other than there is one. It killed, amongst others, 9/11-victims advocate Beverly Eckert, along with Rwanda expert Alison des Forges. I offer it up because I believe it to be true; I haven't heard of any similar reports, but I have heard a contradictory report---that of a pilot who landed shortly before the Flight 3407 crash, who said there were no weather-related issues, with only a "trace" of ice present.

When her sister heard the news of the Buffalo crash on the TV the next morning she became deeply agitated and made Therese promise to never fly in the future under the slightest risk of inclement weather---advice which carries an extra poignancy given that her sister's days seem numbered.

I have my own reasons to believe that this was a deft portend of umbra. If I have honed any clairvoyant skills in my work as a researcher here, I first learned them from Therese. We had become friends after we paired up frequently as local town-hall advocates over a period of several years.

She had learned her sixth-sense skills, particularly in knowing when people were lying or telling the truth, from her father, who had been a New York City police homicide detective. This is one reason why I suspect that all the law enforcement professionals know the real score on 9/11, but by habit and by decree, are made to keep the secret.

Her father had also been the departmental "Irish tenor," a beautifully voiced and comely man who was trotted out to sing at the openings of baseball games and other such official ceremonies. Therese's father is extremely blog worthy for another reason---by dint of an important photograph, which is at present unavailable for posting.

It is an image from a moment in the early 1960's when Elizabeth Taylor was in town to celebrate an elaborate surprise birthday fete for her then-husband, producer Mike Todd; a themed party, "Around the World in 80 Days," held in Madison Square Garden and televised around the world, which really was the pretext to launch Todd's newly released movie of the same name.

As a part of the scripted pretense of surprising Todd, at the last minute, the producers realized Taylor needed an escort for her big arrival in front of the paparazzi at the Garden. Caught empty handed, in desperation they called the mayor's office, who rustled up Therese's father, and they quickly outfitted him in black tie for the job of formal police escort. The image of this seriously photogenic man single-mindedly propelling the glamorous Elizabeth Taylor forward through the crowd by the elbow, while she was at the absolute prime in her looks, and her bejeweled cleavage, is an total icon knock-out, and I sold it as such on e-Bay. Another copy will be provided some day, I am told, and when it is, I'll share it here. If your appetite has been whetted by my description, I promise it won't disappoint. Call this "The Blog that Waits for it's Image."

But another memory of the man makes this a deeper and more synchronistic blog posting for me. Another surprise birthday party was planned, this time for Therese's 50th, years later. It was held in a local waterside restaurant on a Sunday afternoon, and it was just family and old neighborhood friends, but by dint of our current service together, I was invited to sit at Therese's table and be her surprise surprise-party guest. One of my most cherished memories happened at that lunch

Her father was a wee Irish elf of a gray-haired octogenarian by then, endlessly beaming his roguish charm. At the end of lunch, I guess by family tradition, he was asked to get up and sing a few songs, and boy did he ever. I can't remember the names of those Irish ballads, those love songs and songs of loss---only how quiet the room became, and how beautiful his voice sounded in the stillness---when suddenly, at the climb of a love song's melody, Therese let out such a great racking sob of emotion---one extended heave of sound communicating back the love between a father and daughter, as in perfect understanding the family sat there and enjoyed the song's final notes. Embraced in the hush of those mature emotions, what I felt didn't need explaining---it was, and has remained, one of the most beautiful and privileged moments of my life.

When I realized Beverly Eckert and her Jesuit husband would have had to have originally been part of the plot for my ambitiously grand conspiracy theory to remain intellectually consistent, it felt as though the floor was collapsing out beneath me. Would it ever end I wondered?

But then, almost immediately, came flooding back these sorts of powerful memories of the goodness in American families. This is more profound than any negative power or force could address, no matter who seems at any given moment to be the victor, and whom the vanquished. Policemen and firemen and airline pilots are just waiting to reclaim their real American identities, from the shades they've turned into. As awful as I feel in my task here sometimes, this balances it out.

Monday, February 16, 2009

How gorgeous and serene this all looks to me now, seven years later, after the stress of the long siege has given way to a new reality and a new view. This was President's day, 2002, and today feels like the anniversary---I doubt if waiting until Wednesday to be astrologically accurate will matter.

I never knew I could be an artist with a camera until these results came in. Master of light, and master of the level of perspective, I didn't have to become the master of the moment of maximum emotive expression, because all the moments from now on would express the same.

I was deeply influenced by the work of Andreas Serrano obviously. Most famous for his "Piss Christ" moment---which was also a big Rudy Giuliani moment come to think about it, just not as big as 9/11---Serrano took a famous series of photographs of corpses. One of those, a close-up of an eye of a male Mexican cadaver, was brilliantly used in illustration on the dust jacket of Richmond Lattimore's translation of The New Testament, published posthumously in 1996. I'd scan in the picture but I gave my copy away to a special friend, and I haven't replaced it yet, so I'll use something else.

How I was fascinated by that eye! It's so strongly in my "mind's eye" right now, it must be the symbol for the gratitude I feel for the Lattimore translation itself. That was the first time I had ever read the Bible without fear. Lattimore's reputation as a secular scholar of ancient Greek had allowed me to relax and trust that no special biases would be introduced into the text beyond those incorporated in constructing the Greek originals in the first millennium AD. His highly regarded poetic translations of classics like the Iliad and the Odyssey, allowed for myriad biases of course, given the possible variations in subtle precision within the English language, but they would stem from the natural poetry of his mind, and that wasn't what I was afraid of.

I have sat and worked at my desk now, in the same spot approximate to Everett's chakra system, for the past seven years, and not to put too fine a point on it, but I feel a connection. Since I first started living with him in 1979 when I was 21 and he was 58, our age differences established us in a comfortable pedagogic dynamic that still is dominant in my memory. He corrected my pronunciation for what seemed like a dozen times a day for nearly a quarter-century, making no distinction between public and private moments. I still confound the irregular verbs lie and lay, so I guess I am a slow study. I know I am a failure at the politics posed by the public and the private.

In Carl Jung's famous 1961 letter to Bill Wilson, the co-founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, Jung wrote,

"His craving for alcohol was the equivalent on a low level of the spiritual thirst of our being for wholeness, expressed in medieval language: the union with God.

How could one formulate such an insight in a language that is not misunderstood in our days?

The only right and legitimate way to such an experience is that it happens to you in reality and it can only happen to you when you walk on a path which leads you to higher understanding. You might be led to that goal by an act of grace or through a personal and honest contact with friends, or through a higher education of the mind beyond the confines of mere rationalism."

I can't pick between the three choices Jung offers in determining what it is I am feeling these days, so I'll change Jung's or, to an and, claiming all three explanations as operative. In hindsight, it's clear a pre-determining grace infected my whole life. "A Personal and Honest Contact with Friends" should be the name of a dating service, or a supper club, or a sacred encounter site.

It describes my relationship with Everett as well---especially if you put the small stress on the word friend that was the gay marriage of my generation. On the surface, we bickered a great deal, but our unspoken soul contract stated that he would commit to the drastic effort at reparenting me, while I would hold back, staying small until needed, to assist him at the necessary time through the thing he feared most---his experience of dying. Along the way, I picked up a few things, and I turned out to be the best investment he ever made.

Anybody who changes a baby's diapers for its term earns special rights ever after, and the same is true after an old person is cared for. Walt Whitman wrote that "love builds its mansions in the place of excrement," and I'd modify that to say, "in the excrement itself." The power of "the unspeakable vice of the Greeks," is the power of art, at least that was the effect it had on me when I visited the Andres Serrano website.

Everybody should go to thesmokinggun.com to see Aaron Bruns' arrest warrant. He is the FOX News producer who covered Hillery Clinton's last election campaign, who was busted for "kiddie porn" on February 10, and read the affidavit, with some of the "samplings"

An image titled, "Qqaazz pthc pedo 3yo girl tied and butt fucked 1". This image depicts a female child under the age of five with her arms behind her back and bound by duct tape being anally penetrated by an adult male.

I think that photograph should be used to illustrate the dust jacket of The New Testament Bible, American Standard Edition. Maybe then we wouldn't confuse the truth with the lie.

I woke up this morning with a sudden snap, lying on my back, and almost instantaneously my arms raised themselves as if to stretch, but then my hands came together in the attitude of prayer. For someone who rarely uses the postures of prayer, the disembodied motor control stunned me. I thought to myself, "this is probably going to be a good day," and it has been.

Sunday, February 15, 2009

On edit May 4, 2009: Somebody from Gannett visits this page frequently, along with my more elaborated Lauren Ashburn blog page, Lauren Ashburn USAToday Reporter Moonlighting at CBS News9? And if it is Lauren visiting, or a friend or supporter of hers, I just want to say that I love you deeply Lauren. I care about your well being in these difficult times. You must be a very great soul to have come here to play this role. So just know, I will protect all aspects of you with every bit of my life and fortune, because I totally get and forgive you.

I mean---if you step back for a moment, it's very funny, isn't it? How did we get ourselves into such a terrible pickle? Well, it must be for some divine reason, as yet unseen---so everybody, stay cool! Got it?

OK Miss Lizard tongue?!?! OMG!

You gotta click on the expanded view of this GIF to see Lauren in action.

Saturday, February 14, 2009

I had never considered whether or not prominent 9/11-victim activists like the Jersey Girls were false-flag agents of the conspiracy until just today, when I looked at them in the light of the recent death of a 9/11 activist who was a compellingly authentic victim and icon for the truth, Beverly Eckert, who died a few days ago in the synchronistic plane crash outside Buffalo, New York.

You want street cred for authenticity when speaking truth to power? Get yourself killed in a fiery plane crash then. We can tell our Paul Wellstone's from our John F. Kennedy Jr's. It was some dumb person wrongly charging Eckert with being false flag that initiated my comparison study. It isn't very hard at all to compare the four against the one as seen in the public record, when the proposition has already been laid out for you, just at 180 degrees from the truth, which is a clear sign of the devil.

Before we go further, read Beverly Eckert's manifesto, My Silence Cannot be Bought, from the Dec. 9, 2003 issue of USAToday. (See a copy at the bottom of this blog, and note the purity of communication in the composition structure of the title.)

The late Beverly Eckert, the widow of Sean P. Rooney

One of the only three links I have ever posted on my blog is to a movie presentation of the Jersey Girls' story, titled, "In Their Own Words," a tale which continues to move and inspire me, even this morning, as I dipped a big toe in for a bit. But damn people, it sure is a slickly done presentation, odd for something wearing an opposition-work label. Of course, I don't even want to get into Ann Coulter now. As far as I'm concerned, they are all trauma-trained beta slaves at a nickle a dozen, extras, a la carte. Go to it alphas.

I know that if these women are who they really say they are, they will understand the nature of the field that is enveloping them, and applaud any doubting-Thomas examinations of the legitimacy of their roles---given the spiraling complexity of the 9/11 plot, and the central role played by false-flag agents manipulating a synthetic reality, everything occludes the ultimate truths---until it evolves and doesn't anymore.

(On edit:) I really have to stop asking myself questions when I already know the answers. It took a single news article to convince me that when seen in the contrasting light shone by Eckert's martyrdom, Kristen Breitweiser is a false-flag media widow whore. We can extrapolate from there. (I propose a program of amnesty for all the myriad [get it?] conspirators---with public confession and absolution as its healing centerpiece---for participants who, at minimum, were manipulated through their economic exploitation, but extending all the way to total soul domination and control via drugs, torture and trauma. There are no guilty participants in 9/11. Anything truly evil will disappear when it is brought to the light of day.)

The sadly focused Kristen Breitweiser

Look first at the elaborate treatment bradblog gave the article, from the Sydney Morning Herald on Sept. 9, 2006, called, Right sets attack dogs on Jersey Girl widows, all the while Brad Blog steers far afield of any truth---as now the story is about the hateful Ann Coulter. Bad Brad Blog!

Let me show you what I mean: First, I numbered all the paragraphs in the 9/9/06 article, from one to 34, (see below,) then I use paragraphs 1, 16, 19, and 25 to prove my central thesis: that the Jersey girl's took the money, and that compromised the effectiveness of the investigation. It goes like this,

Paragraph 1. Breitweiser is vouchsafed as a savvy woman with a law degree who never practiced, because she says, her husband was so very successful.

Paragraph 11. Is Ann Coulter's actionable insult: "These broads are millionaires … I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much [and] how do we know [the] husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy." When seen in isolation, doesn't this sound like Ann playing with her reputation a little bit? But the group-lump category of "millionaires," can only be speaking to the fact of the buyout, and this establishes a basic premise--that the bitches took the buyout money.

Paragraph 16. Reads in full: "The weeks that followed were numbing. But as the process of compensation was explained to families, Breitweiser's untried legal training kicked in and she wondered: if the families signed away their right to legal action as part of any compensation settlement, how would there ever be a proper public examination of what had gone wrong?"

Paragraph 19. restates the argument, reading in full, "In her own book, Wake-Up Call, Breitweiser writes: "If the Government took away our right to sue and to hold people accountable in a court of law, then we wanted accountability through an exhaustive [public] investigation." Did the writer of the Sydney Morning Herald piece, Paul McGeough, put public in brackets because Breitweiser didn't use it in her book, but that is what she really meant?

In Paragraph 25, the money shot says, "But in the end, Bush gave evidence - even if it was in private and with Cheney by his side. Rice, too, was made to take the stand." "But in the end?" It wouldn't have been the end if she hadn't taken the money. The end for another widow didn't come until January, 2009.

Talking about your concerns isn't the same as acting on them as informed by your values. If Breitweiser was concerned that her leverage would be lost by taking the compensation, she should have waited until the investigation was completed to her satisfaction before she did. What she and her fellow Jersey Girls accomplished was fatally marred by the secret (the meaning of the word private,) unnotated or recorded, and collaboratively delivered testimonies of the president and the vice-president. It is valueless, in other words. But saying that Rice was "made to take the stand," is a slap in our faces from the Sydney paper's writer, Paul McGeough, since facing hostile questioning in a public court room under the threat of perjury is what "taking the stand" means, and that didn't happen, because Breitweiser failed to use her leverage to achieve it.

The damage to Ann Coulter's career was the next step in the faked gun battle of the Jersey girl saga. I believe NBC's Matt Lauer to be compromised, if not complicit, in the 9/11 conspiracy by dint of his performance that morning. Watching him grow testy while interviewing Coulter later, then becomes the new news, as celebrity journalists vie for the affection once reserved for soap opera actresses. It was reported that all the news channels decided to pool their footage and resources and disseminate it from one central studio, supposedly at the behest of the 60 minutes producer, Don Hewitt.

Paragraph 26. validated exactly the wrong conclusions, by saying, "The commission became a warts-and-all examination of the failings and shortcomings of the US intelligence services and other agencies that responded to or might have prevented the September 11 attacks. Its voluminous findings---including recommendations for an overhaul of the intelligence services vindicated the stand taken by the widows."

An overhauling of American intelligence services is the primary gain said to have resulted from the 9/11 Commission report. However, the report doesn't even mention the NSA---probably because the commission staff were being housed in spare NSA offices, and were working under NSA security protocols as the NSA spoon-fed the commission staff the ingredients of its conclusions ---so the report can't and doesn't mention any recommendations or reforms for the NSA.

In Sept. 11 widow killed in Buffalo plane crash, Associated Press writer Devlin Barrett appears to be deliberately trying to confuse his readers by making Beverly Eckert into a Jersey Girl clone, "part of a small group of widows, mothers, and children who played the roles of lobbyists." and together, "forced lawmakers in 2004 to pass sweeping reforms of the U.S. intelligence apparatus."

The fact that Eckert hadn't taken the buyout money but had kept the leverage that Breitweiser had sold, and was using it to advocate behind the scenes for further investigation, as her meeting with Obama suggests, was lost in its entirety from Barrett article. Instead, he writes, "After the law passed, she turned her energies to Habitat for Humanity, helping build homes for low-income families." This is a deliberate cover-up by the AP of the secret negotiations taking place as we speak.

In Paragraph 28. Breitweiser is provided with a standard version of the rock classic, "Wedding Band Returned from Hell," overused approximately 30 times in the 9/11 victim corpus. Both burned Pentagon matinee idol's Brian Birdwell and Kevin Schaeffer have one, while Flight 93 victim and voice-morphing-technology expert, Andrew Garcia, has an especially motivational Christian version. Then paragraphs 29 through 33 take the story and spins it through an absurdest rewrite---offering the detail that officials had found Breitweiser's husband's right arm and hand, which had been lost in a freezer for three years. We aren't told if the gold band came with a left finger inserted in it, or if was itself encased in a left glove.

Paragraph 34. has Breitweiser just able to squeeze an open-letter response to Coulter onto the final seven pages of her waiting manuscript for her book Wake-Up Call, which should have been given the title, Sold Too Soon. The open letter begins: "Dear Ann: But for the murder of our husbands on 9/11, we would not have gone to Washington."

Brad Blog added the following emphasis in the New York Times article of November 30, 2002 about the The Kissinger commission

In naming Henry Kissinger to direct a comprehensive examination of the U.S. government's failure to prevent the Sept. 11 attacks, President George W. Bush has selected a consummate Washington insider. Kissinger obviously has a keen intellect and vast experience in national security matters. Unfortunately, his affinity for power and the commercial interests he has cultivated since leaving government may make him less than the staunchly independent figure that is needed for this critical post. Indeed, it is tempting to wonder if the choice of Kissinger is not a clever maneuver by the White House to contain an investigation it long opposed. [emphasis added]

Is the Times really tempted to consider Kissinger's appointment "clever?" A much more likely story would be that by first promoting such an obviously unqualified candidate as Kissinger, the Jersey Girl's could be given a scripted victory already in the can as their sendoff launch present.

The acting in this scenario has been actually very good, up to New York standards, in other words. We are arriving in the valley of the ultimate truths here, with the foundation floor of made-up reality getting down into the harder clay.

Eckert's statement of principle, published at the two-year anniversary mark, deserves to be widely read today as her epitaph, and to serve as contrast to the Jersey Girl's absence of truth. Brought together, they will act as a catalyst to deeper awakenings to more ultimate truths. And unambiguous titles, such as, "My Silence Cannot Be Bought," are the only kind that can be understood now.___________________________________________________________________

I've chosen to go to court rather than accept a payoff from the 9/11 victims compensation fund. Instead, I want to know what went so wrong with our intelligence and security systems that a band of religious fanatics was able to turn four U.S passenger jets into an enemy force, attack our cities and kill 3,000 civilians with terrifying ease. I want to know why two 110-story skyscrapers collapsed in less than two hours and why escape and rescue options were so limited.

I am suing because unlike other investigative avenues, including congressional hearings and the 9/11 commission, my lawsuit requires all testimony be given under oath and fully uses powers to compel evidence.

The victims fund was not created in a spirit of compassion. Rather, it was a tacit acknowledgment by Congress that it tampered with our civil justice system in an unprecedented way. Lawmakers capped the liability of the airlines at the behest of lobbyists who descended on Washington while the Sept. 11 fires still smoldered.

And this liability cap protects not just the airlines, but also World Trade Center builders, safety engineers and other defendants.

The caps on liability have consequences for those who want to sue to shed light on the mistakes of 9/11. It means the playing field is tilted steeply in favor of those who need to be held accountable. With the financial consequences other than insurance proceeds removed, there is no incentive for those whose negligence contributed to the death toll to acknowledge their failings or implement reforms. They can afford to deny culpability and play a waiting game.

By suing, I've forfeited the "$1.8 million average award" for a death claim I could have collected under the fund. Nor do I have any illusions about winning money in my suit. What I do know is I owe it to my husband, whose death I believe could have been avoided, to see that all of those responsible are held accountable. If we don't get answers to what went wrong, there will be a next time. And instead of 3,000 dead, it will be 10,000. What will Congress do then?

So I say to Congress, big business and everyone who conspired to divert attention from government and private-sector failures: My husband's life was priceless, and I will not let his death be meaningless. My silence cannot be bought.__________________________________________________________________From the Sydney Morning Herald's main man in New York, Paul McGeough, September 9, 2006 Right sets attack dogs on Jersey Girl widows by Paul McGeough Chief Herald Correspondent in New York September 9, 2006

1. THE angel-faced Kristen Breitweiser had it all. She hung out in the bars on the beaches of New Jersey. She did the law degree - but did not need to practise. She eloped and married on a tiny Caribbean beach.

2. So how did a poster child for a privileged version of the American dream become one of the Witches of East Brunswick?

3. After she married and settled down, her husband, Ron, knew best. She always said she would read the pieces he marked in The Wall Street Journal but, in truth, she was obsessed with home decorating and did not go much beyond the lifestyle pages.

4. Fast forward to April 2004, and Breitweiser is being shredded on the opinion page of Ron's beloved Journal. Media-savvy friends explain it is a measure of how she is perceived as a threat to be reckoned with by dark forces in Washington.

5. Just a few weeks ago she faced a full-frontal assault in a new book by the so-called Queen of Mean, the radical right-wing commentator Ann Coulter, who labeled Breitweiser a witch.

6. Americans warmed to Breitweiser and three other September 11, 2001, widows. They were dubbed "the Jersey Girls" as they campaigned for the US equivalent of a royal commission into the al-Qaeda attacks on Washington and New York.

7. There were shades of Thelma and Louise as they wore a path to the capital, finding the courage to stare down the President, George Bush; Vice-President, Dick Cheney; and Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice. They demanded an explanation of the failures that allowed their husbands to be incinerated in the World Trade Centre.

8. Breitweiser's four-wheel-drive became the "widowmobile". Each had her favourite seat for the long drive from their homes in East Brunswick, New Jersey. Breitweiser and Mindy Kleinberg were always up front, and Patty Casazza and Lorie Van Auken in the back. They would arrive in DC with their personal anthem blaring on the stereo - Diana Ross's Ain't No Mountain High Enough.

9. The widows' success in provoking an inquiry that criticised the CIA, the FBI and successive presidential administrations has infuriated Coulter, a mouthpiece for the neo-conservatives.

10. Coulter's book Godless: The Church of Liberalism, with a print run of 1 million, mounts a ferocious attack on the Jersey widows: "These self-obsessed women seem genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and [they act] as if [it] only happened to them."

11. "These broads are millionaires … I've never seen people enjoying their husbands' deaths so much [and] how do we know [the] husbands weren't planning to divorce these harpies? Now that their shelf life is dwindling, they'd better hurry up and appear in Playboy."

12. For some, it was just another measure of how low and vicious Coulter can be when it comes to selling her books. But for many, she had just used her savage tongue to mark out the breadth of the political divide in George Bush's America.

13. Breitweiser personifies a majority US viewpoint that now sees the Iraq war as a misguided and unwinnable conflict that is burning up funds and resources that could be better directed towards upgrading domestic security to ensure that September 11 is not repeated.

14. She told the Herald this week: "It breaks my heart when people talk of the war in Iraq as vengeance for my husband's death. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11 but we still have FBI computers that don't work - one of the reasons for 9/11 was our failure to join the dots and the FBI has spent $US170 million on new software and they still can't do it."

15. Ron Breitweiser's office was on the 94th floor of the World Trade Centre south tower. On the morning of September 11 he called just after the first strike, on the north tower. He assured his wife that he was safe, but she turned on the TV and within minutes she watched a huge fireball consume the top of the south tower.

16. The weeks that followed were numbing. But as the process of compensation was explained to families, Breitweiser's untried legal training kicked in and she wondered: if the families signed away their right to legal action as part of any compensation settlement, how would there ever be a proper public examination of what had gone wrong?

17. Clearly, September 11 was an attack instigated by foreign terrorists. But what mistakes by American agencies had made them possible? Or had made the outcome worse than it needed to be? She became fixated on the extent to which both government and business accepted lax security for the simple reason that the risk of actions for negligence was cheaper than doing all that was expected of them.

18. She met the other three widows in the aftermath of the attacks and they bonded in phone calls that went into the early hours of the morning - when they could cry without distressing their children.

19. In her own book, Wake-Up Call, Breitweiser writes: "If the Government took away our right to sue and to hold people accountable in a court of law, then we wanted accountability through an exhaustive [public] investigation."

20. They wanted to know more about the CIA's role in flying members of the bin Laden family out of the US in the days after the attacks; why workers in the towers were ordered to stay at their desks after the strikes; they wanted to know how the attacks had been executed when US intelligence agencies seemed to know so much about the attackers.

21. Describing Cheney as "the principal attack dog" in opposing calls for an inquiry, she writes: "I couldn't help but wonder what Ron would be thinking. He venerated [him, but Cheney] had been a big fat stumbling block from day one … He was the puppeteer pulling strings in the background."

22. The widows fought, and won, on the principles of the inquiry's independence and its right to summons witnesses and documents. And then they went head to head with the White House's first candidate as head of the investigation - the fabled Henry Kissinger. The veteran Republican warrior and contemporary Washington lobbyist invited the Jersey Girls to his office for coffee, over which he was somewhat taken aback when they demanded to see his client list, to ensure that there was no conflict of interest.

23. Breitweiser writes: "Kissinger told us to trust him. We told him we couldn't … Kissinger seemed stunned … He didn't understand the fuss about his client list - they were all reputable people, he said.

24 "Kissinger seemed stricken and became unsteady. In reaching for his cup of coffee he bobbled, knocked the pot, spilled his own cup and nearly fell off the couch." Kissinger never answered their question and the next day he resigned from the chairmanship of the September 11 commission.

25. Bush refused to meet the widows. And when they thought they might get to him with an approach to the first lady, she didn't even reply. But in the end, Bush gave evidence - even if it was in private and with Cheney by his side. Rice, too, was made to take the stand.

26. The commission became a warts-and-all examination of the failings and shortcomings of the US intelligence services and other agencies that responded to or might have prevented the September 11 attacks. Its voluminous findings - including recommendations for an overhaul of the intelligence services - vindicated the stand taken by the widows.

27. Throughout, Breitweiser was also going through the brutal process of adapting to widowhood and her new status as a "single mom".

28. The first police visit came about a month after the attacks - a wedding ring engraved with Ron Breitweiser's name and the date of their engagement had been recovered at ground zero. Like so many others, she could not accept the finality.

29. In January last year, she and her seven-year-old daughter, Caroline, were making a new start, moving into an apartment in Manhattan when the friend who had acted as an intermediary with the authorities called again: "More of Ron's body parts [have been] recovered."

30. She writes: "It was Ron's right arm, from the shoulder on down, with his hand and fingers intact".

31. The shock prompted a conference call, during which the other three Jersey Girls stayed on the line as Breitweiser called the medical examiner. She explains: "[They] had lost his right arm in the freezer for three years."

32. What can you say after an exchange like that? Patty, one of the back-seat passengers in the widowmobile, filled the void by resorting to the black humour that often sustained them. This was Ron's way of "sending a helping hand" on the day that Kristen and Caroline were moving house, she said.

33. Breitweiser still worries when she thinks about the carefree world in which she was reared and the very different country in which her daughter is growing up.

34. Publishing schedules can be merciless, but Breitweiser had the good fortune to be able to squeeze an open letter to Ann Coulter into the last seven pages of Wake-Up Call. It begins: "Dear Ann: But for the murder of our husbands on 9/11, we would not have gone to Washington …"

Monday, February 02, 2009

A good source for "the other" point of view (Hamas') is found at “Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigades”
They do a much finer job of maintaining their equilibrium than I do. They acknowledge their rocket attacks, but they are most frequently against military targets, (and Israel doesn't help, interchangeably calling a site a kibbutzim or a military base, all the while pointing the finger at Hamas hiding behind civilian shields.) And Hamas doesn't get into pissing contests denying the 40-kilometer rocket attacks Israel attributes to them---in fact, they don't even say the name of their opponent, lest it empower them---it is always just "the Zionist entity."
At that Hamas web site I found this,

"Where is the courage of this army, which fought by the technology from the air and from inside the tanks against people [who] just have a few weapons and equipments, the strange thing that the Zionist army is the only army in the world who used diapers, which means very clearly (Pampers), they do not dare to go down to the field to confront the men."

The English is bad, but even so, I don't think Hamas understands what's going on here. I Googled "military wearing pampers into combat" and only one relevant link returned, a YouTube of the same Brigade making the same charge. Israeli Soldiers Wear Diapers.

It's funny, because I think I know why they are wearing diapers. One time I was copping crack on upper Amsterdam Avenue and before the connection was completed, I got so excited at the prospect, I shat myself with explosive diarrhea in the car, and had to drive home like that. Minor impediment in that game, mind you, which is the closest I've ever come to warfare.

I think the Israelis (and the Americans in Iraq) wear diapers because in the actualization of their blood lust, in the fulsomeness of their high-tech killing, in the orgiastic moment of the annihilation of their opponents, they literally can't control themselves, tantamount to an orgasmic coming. These men and woman love the murder that they do. It is not precise, it is not proportional, it is lied about afterward is all, to minimize it for civilian consumption. The shit just explodes out their asses. This is the truth.